I am using Outlook 2003 and am having trouble sending messages. Once I send a
message I've composed, I immediately get a System Administrator message in my
in box informing me that the message was not delivered. Here is the complete
message:
Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.
Subject: Indemnification
Sent: 6/25/2008 4:00 PM
The following recipient(s) could not be reached:
'pat@address deleted.com' on 6/25/2008 4:00 PM
550 <pat@address deleted.com> No such user here
This message is immediate and it seems Outlook is not even attempting to
contact my server for delivery. I have checked the account by going to
Options then E-mail Accounts and I ran the test there, which worked fine.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Ron J.
That is an e-mail that you received, not an error message generated by
Outlook. Either your SMTP mail host rejected your e-mail (which is
likely as noted below) or the receiving mail host is telling you there
is no such user by that name on their domain.
I suspect the problem is because you have a space in the domain name.
Spaces are NOT allowed anywhere in an e-mail address. Perhaps the
"address deleted" really meant to be a non-descriptive placeholder
string for the real domain. It would've been better to use a bogus
username substituted for the real username in the NDR (non-delivery
report) e-mail that you received and copied here rather than hide the
domain but it's too late now.
It takes very time for a sending SMTP mail host to get notified by the
receiving SMTP mail host that no such username is defined at the
receiving domain. The two SMTP hosts make a connection, then the
sending mail host issues a RCPT-TO command. That is the name of the
recipient. The receiving mail host can immediately indicate with its
return status whether or not that user is defined. The e-mail could be
hundreds of megabytes in size but NONE of will get sent if the username
is rejected by the receiving mail host. Only after a good status is
returned by the RCPT-TO command does the sending mail host then issue
the DATA command, wait for an OK status back from the other end, and
then start sending the body of your e-mail (headers and message). Since
the username got rejected imediately, the DATA command was never issued
so nothing of your e-mail's body got sent. They connected, the RCPT-TO
username got rejected, they immediately aborted the mail session, and
your mail host immediately sent you the NDR. It's very quick.
Only if the receiving mail host is misconfigured to check *after* the
mail session would the NDR take longer to show up, if at all. Once the
mail session is over, the mail host and recipient have no absolute proof
as to who was the sender. All they can rely on are the headers that the
*sender* inserted into the body of their e-mail, and the sender can
falsify that info. You can, too, by putting anything you want in the
E-mail Address field in the e-mail account that you defined in Outlook
to put a bogus or usurped e-mail address in the From header. That gets
sent during the DATA command. So if the receiving mail host doesn't
reject DURING its mail session with the sending mail host, it will
accept the DATA command, wait for the message transfer, end the mail
session, find out later the e-mail is undeliverable, and then issue a
new e-mail to send back to the professed sender (i.e., the return-path
info that the *sender* specified). That takes a lot longer.
A properly configured mail host will reject an undeliverable e-mail
DURING the mail session so the rejection is immediate to the sending
mail host which will immediately notify the real sender of the
rejection.
If "address deleted" was your placeholder for the real domain name then
the receiving mail host is telling that there is no "pat" username
registered with their e-mail service. You'll have to get the correct
e-mail address for the recipient of your e-mail.
